What Does This Look Like?
I had confirmed that a hostile faction had indeed succeeded in infiltrating Dungeon Island, but there was no need to work myself into a panic over it just yet.
Things would stay quiet for a while anyway.
During the mentoring period, graduates swarmed every last corner of the island, which meant the enemy's room to operate was severely limited. Whatever incident they tried to stir up would be suppressed and finished almost before it began, so if they wanted to maximize the damage, they would have to bide their time—until the first mentoring period ended and the graduates had all pulled out.
They'll probably make their move around the midterms.
The date written into the coded message had pointed to roughly that window, after all.
For now, the best thing I could do was simple: get stronger.
So I called Dang Gyu-young out for the rest of the weekend, too, and put in more sparring sessions. 'Senior, spar with me. Spar with me.' When I wheedled like that, she grumbled about what a bother it was, yet somehow could never quite bring herself to refuse me. That said, not even a mentor was entitled to monopolize the time of a third-year club president indefinitely, so for the hours I couldn't claim her, I trained on my own. If my top priority was grinding skill ranks through the mentoring events, the next one down was refining my core in the Mana Cultivation Room.
The elixirs I'd won off Kim Gap-du were the [Great Clear Pill] and a [Three-Hundred-Year Wild Ginseng]. I took the comparatively weaker of the two, the ginseng, first, then settled into breathing meditation. Of course, that was only "comparatively" speaking—the energy packed into a B-Rank elixir was truly immense. I had spent the entire weekend night in the Special Training Room and still hadn't managed to melt it all down.
It being Monday was a shame, but the academic schedule came first; I would simply have to resume my mana cultivation that night.
As always, I was just about to wake Seo Ye-in and ask if she wanted to grab a meal together—when, for once, there were already messages waiting.
The sun really was about to rise in the west...
To think that human sloth had gotten up early in the morning and contacted me first. Granted, this wasn't unheard of—just rare.
We claimed a table in the student cafeteria, Seo Ye-in and I sitting across from each other. Today's menu was a simple omurice—fried rice wrapped in an egg sheet thin as paper. The kitchen staff's skill was on full display, and it would have held its own against any proper restaurant in town.
Even so, Seo Ye-in was eating a touch slower than usual. It didn't look like the food was the problem; more likely she was already a little full. She must have snacked on a few cookies while baking. My own policy was that it didn't matter what I ate so long as my stomach was full and my nutrition was covered, so I let it slide.
Meanwhile, I shifted my gaze past Seo Ye-in's shoulder—and went still.
A little ways off, in an easy-to-miss corner of the hall, sat Ahn Jungmi, quiet as ever. Her posture was so perfectly composed that I couldn't tell whether she was even eating, but her plate told the real story: the omurice was vanishing at a remarkable clip. Her spoon moved faster than the eye could follow, and with every blur of motion another bite disappeared.
And while somehow pulling off elegance and speed—two goals in open conflict—at the same time, she still spared the occasional glance in our direction to check that Seo Ye-in was eating properly. Truly, multitasking refined to its absolute limit.
I sent Ahn Jungmi my respect and my sympathy in equal measure.
Note to self: never become a butler.
And never, ever join Hyeseong Group.
Once we'd finished off the omurice, we moved to a quieter spot. We sat side by side on the bench there, and Seo Ye-in rustled out a paper bag. At long last, the cookies revealed themselves.
She baked a lot this time.
The bag was bigger than last time's, stuffed plump to the seams, and the rich, nutty aroma drifting out of it suggested the flavor had leveled up a step as well. When we'd visited the Downtown bakery together, she had packed up one cookie of every variety "for research purposes," and apparently that research had borne fruit. On both quantity and taste, I could set my expectations high.
But where there is good news, bad news is never far behind.
Which means the variety must have grown, too.
More varieties meant the cookie shape-guessing challenge had just gotten harder. Worse, Go Hyeon-woo—my designated bullet catcher for these games—was nowhere to be found. A flicker of tension ran through me as I racked my brain for a way out of this ordeal.
And the instant Seo Ye-in drew a cookie from the bag to hand it over, I struck first.
"They look delicious. You get better every time. Thanks for the food."
I fired off my thanks in record time and popped the cookie straight into my mouth. No cookie, no challenge. Call it Operation: Eat It Before She Asks.
But Seo Ye-in, as if she had seen it coming, quietly caught my wrist a heartbeat before the cookie reached my lips. Then she stared at me dead-on and asked:
"What does this look like?"
Operation: Eat It Before She Asks—a failure. Once again, I found myself forcibly drafted into the shape-guessing challenge.
I studied the cookie with all the gravity of a scholar examining a rare artifact.
That curve could almost be a crossbow... A penguin? No. A penguin would have a beak.
I had noticed it many times by now, but it was a genuinely inscrutable shape. Still, this quiz came with a time limit. Stall too long and it amounted to admitting I didn't know, so I might as well just guess. After much agonizing, I opened my mouth to answer "penguin"—
—and the air behind Seo Ye-in wavered. Ahn Jungmi appeared, quietly dismissing her concealment. She traded a covert glance with me and tilted her chin; she had noticed my predicament, and it looked as though she meant to throw me a lifeline. True to her veteran-butler instincts, she seemed to know the answer the moment her eyes flicked to the cookie. The problem was how to convey it to me.
Ahn Jungmi deliberated for a moment, her expression grave. Then, as if steeling some decision, she began to move—recreating a series of motions with her hands and her whole body. Her face was as businesslike as ever, but a flush had risen on her cheeks; privately, it seemed, she wasn't entirely at ease with this.
Miss Butler...
This was the woman who kept textbook posture even while eating omurice, all for the sake of dignity—and she had resolved to compromise that very dignity if it meant handing me the right answer. I could not let such a sacrifice go to waste, so I threw myself into decoding her pantomime with everything I had.
Swimming strokes. Balancing a ball on her nose. Clapping her flippers.
Cross-reference all of that with the cookie's shape...
"A seal. Right?"
Seo Ye-in said nothing. She simply popped the cookie into my mouth for me. Which meant: correct.
But the cookie shape-guessing challenge was only just beginning. Out of the paper bag popped Alien Lifeform No. 2.
"And this one?"
...A brachiosaurus?
Unfortunately, "dinosaur" was a keyword with a losing record already on the books. I shot Ahn Jungmi a pleading look, and she crossed her arms. Then, pinching her nose with one hand, she swung the other through the air as if seizing hold of something. The one and only elephant-trunk pose. The moment Seo Ye-in glanced back at her, she snapped into a crisp attention stance—but her point had already come through loud and clear.
"An elephant."
Correct again. Seo Ye-in gave a tiny nod and fed me the brachio—elephant cookie.
And so the challenge rolled on. Though in truth, its essence had long since changed into a game of guessing words from Ahn Jungmi's charades. Either way, once I had landed a few more correct answers, Seo Ye-in seemed satisfied with her aesthetic sensibilities; she asked nothing further and settled in to crunch cookies alongside me instead. Ahn Jungmi, for her part, kept fanning her deepening-red face with one hand.
When our eyes met, I dipped my head slightly.
"Thank you."
"...It was nothing."
So long as it could be of help to me, she seemed to be saying, she would gladly swallow any amount of embarrassment. Then she turned it back around on me:
"And in fact, the thanks ought to be flowing from my side. I'm only sorry it took me this long to say so."
When I asked with a look what she meant, Ahn Jungmi went on.
"The truth is, when you and the young miss went out to the Downtown district, there was opposition within the Future Strategy Office. Some felt that awarding a B-Rank coupon was excessive."
A while back, as thanks for helping train and motivate Seo Ye-in, Ahn Jungmi had given me one B-Rank item exchange voucher—and then a second one, to track down an item the girl might grow attached to. Evidently, the opposition faction inside the Future Strategy Office had taken a dim view of that. There was always the risk, after all, of precious B-Rank vouchers being squandered on nothing.
"But thanks to the results you delivered—beyond anything we expected, Kim Ho-nim—I was able to save face. So, thank you."
Not only had I found a bracelet that Seo Ye-in adored, I had taken a B-Rank coupon and come back with something a full tier above it, an A. The opposition faction would have been left with nothing to say. And if I kept drawing meaningful results out of Seo Ye-in like this, I expected the Future Strategy Office's support to continue even after the mentoring program ended.
"I also hear you obtained the same bracelet, Kim Ho-nim."
"I did. They dropped as a set of two."
Ahn Jungmi's gaze drifted down to my wrist, so I showed off the bracelet and summoned my dark cloud.
- Boing!
A fist-sized dark cloud came bouncing merrily through the air. Seo Ye-in, watching it idly, lifted her index finger and gave it a poke. The cloud drifted a little way in the direction of the poke, then bounced right back and resumed floating nearby.
- Boing!
Seo Ye-in summoned a white cloud of her own. The white one floated over to the dark gray one as if delighted to see it, but the gray one wanted nothing to do with it. As the fluffy cloud drew near, the dark one hunched up slightly—then knocked it away with a body slam. The white cloud, utterly undeterred, simply kept chasing the dark one around. The two of them bumped into each other, bounced off one another, and played a lively game of tag.
We watched it all in silence for a while, and then I asked Ahn Jungmi:
"How did last week's mentoring go?"
"It was a great success."
Featherwalk's rank had climbed steeply in a matter of mere weeks—it was already C-Rank. That put her above the average for a first-year, and her proficiency, I was told, had been raised to the point of being usable in real combat. From what I heard, she had used that dramatically boosted mobility to slip past Gwak Ji-cheol's suppression, close the distance, and let her shotgun loose at point-blank range.
If the final week went on like this, everything would be fine—
"It's just..."
Ahn Jungmi looked at Seo Ye-in with eyes full of worry. I had noticed it myself, the moment I saw her that morning.
"She does seem to have lost a good deal of her motivation."
"...She has."
The first week of mentoring, we had captured Seo Ye-in's interest with a new skill to learn: Featherwalk. The second week, we had motivated her with the promise of a weekend trip to the Downtown district together. The energy she had recharged there had just barely dragged her through the third week—but this week, no one knew what would get that human sloth moving again. It was a problem beyond Ahn Jungmi's power to solve, which meant she needed to borrow my hands yet again.
Cookie in mouth, I thought it over for a moment before answering.
"I'll look for a way."
If I cross-referenced this week's raid content against my own schedule...
there might just be a breakthrough in sight.
[139] The Support Ate It All